Hello friends! I’m back for another installment. This time, summer edition. I always associate August with Tennis. The National Bank Open (at our very own Sobeys Stadium on the grounds of York University) is August 1-13 every year. I’ve been going for the last three years or so, and I love it. I love that they alternate the men’s and women’s tournaments between Toronto and Montreal. I love walking the circuit of food stalls and outreach booths, sampling lobster rolls and yogurt tasters from Liberté. (Did you know they were a Quebec brand, by the way?) More than all those things, I love the late summer experience of watching virtuoso tennis — the setting sun turning the sky a thousand shades of orange, pink, and tempered blue during the night matches. I’ve seen Sinner play, Alexei Popyrin, Jessica Pegula, Bianca Andreescu, and Kayla Cross. It’s one of those things that’s always better with a big group, like a big-budget adventure movie played on a gigantic screen in a crowded theatre or a power ballad sung by every person at a concert. So much better than watching on TV. There’s also the US Open Tournament in late August. I went a couple years ago, and it was amazing and incredibly overcrowded. New York City (or rather, Queens) is a muggy wonderland in late August. It turns out VPL has a fair number of books about the elegant sport, including biographies, autobiographies, and non-fiction texts. In researching our catalogue, I was drawn to stories of women succeeding in a male-dominated sport and industry. In effect, this post has become an opportunity to get to know some faces that have no doubt been overlooked in the years since their heydays. It’s also a bit of a hopeful reminder because these women’s successes have directly influenced the successes of many women who came after. Hope can be a powerful rallying cry, after all. Have you heard of Lottie Dod? According to Sasha Abramsky, she was the ‘world’s first female sports superstar.” She can also claim the fame of being the youngest woman to win Wimbledon’s Singles Championship in 1887 at 15! She then won a further four times. And somehow I doubt she’s a household name here or in her native UK. Imagine the complexity and difficulty of such an achievement. Now imagine winning Wimbledon with a metal-and-whalebone corset on. You can see in the picture to the left the kind of attire expected for women playing a rigorous, high energy, high mobility sport. Dod’s corset drew blood as she moved during the game. (Interesting tangent for those interested in tangents: an article from The Science History Institute’s Distillations Magazine recounts the struggle of jogger Lisa Lindahl to jog without a proper sports bra in the 70s in Vermont. Dod’s violent corset encounter is put in the context of women’s centuries-spanning fight for comfortable athletic wear in the article.) A veritable renaissance woman of sport, after dominating the scene for a while, “she moved on to and excelled in myriad other sports: she became a leading ice skater and tobogganist, a mountaineer, an endurance bicyclist, a hockey player, a British ladies’ golf champion, and an Olympic silver medalist in archery.” An early leader for women in athletic pursuits for sure. You can read Sasha Abramsky’s biography of the little-known, early tennis star in our catalogue.